


Departure

by andloawhatsit



Category: Arrival (2016)
Genre: Alternate Ending, F/M, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-11 21:24:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9029531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andloawhatsit/pseuds/andloawhatsit
Summary: Hannah asks Louise two questions, neither of which are the ones Louise expects.





	

Hannah asks Louise two questions, neither of which are the ones Louise expects. She doesn’t ask, _Did you know?_ or _Why didn’t you tell me?_ Nor does she ask, like Ian had, _Why did you choose this?_ and _Why did you do this?_ _Choose_ implying intent; _this_ being a catch-all word for the substance of their three distinct lives, all muddled together; _do_ standing in for _ruin_. Meaning, _Louise, why did you ruin our lives?_ Ian had said none of that  directly, not even once, but he packed his computer, his phone, and a spare set of clothes with his sorrow and left for a _temporary break_ that stretched into years. But time doesn’t concern Louise the way it once did, the way it might have before the Arrival. She is always experiencing the most intense sorrow she has ever felt, but she is also always experiencing the most transcendent joy: thesis defence-first orgasm-car crash-grandma’s death-heptapod encounter-Hannah… 

If Ian had ever asked, she would have described it with Hannah herself — giving birth, the best and the worst, together — but he never did. Having been there in the early days, Ian had become, de facto, one of the scarce world experts in the Heptapod language, with all of the non-linear immersion that came with it, but it frightened him and he resisted it. _Things have an order, a process_ , he would say. _The natural order, the scientific process. There’s a method. You can’t just jump around._ When the doctors told them, at last, of the bullet coming for Hannah, and Ian looked at her, Louise found she could not overtly deceive him as easily as she lied by omission and it was only with an internalized strictness like amputation that she stopped herself saying, cruelly, _You could have known, Ian, but you closed your eyes._

* * *

_I read your book_ , says Ian. _Did I ever tell you that? Never mind, that shouldn’t be a question, I  know I never told you. "The Universal Language."_

_Published in the fall, after we split_ , says Louise. _I threw myself into it. I wasn’t paying attention to much, outside of that. And Hannah, of course._ Guilt pierces her, the way her child has already become an afterthought. But she remembers the day Hannah was born. She’s still living it.

* * *

Even with Louise’s so-called prescience —  _but it isn’t prescience,_ she tells her students, _prescience is knowing what will happen, prescience depends on a straight line, this is everything in the present tense_  — Hannah’s questions surprise her. (The surprise itself is its own kind of test: if Louise didn’t see the questions coming, could the future itself be different? _But the future cannot be changed_ , she reminds herself, again and again.  _The future has already happened_.) Hannah asks, because she has always been very quick:  _Is this why Dad left us?_ and _You’ve been teaching me Heptapod since I was born, why didn’t I know?_

To the first question, Louise answers, _No._ Ian’s departure was driven by anger at herself for the burden she had not shared, a burden become a secret, then by virtue of its concealment, a lie. 

Hannah, sitting over a milkshake in the hospital cafeteria, doesn’t seem to buy her response, skepticism written as clearly in her face as if it were in Heptapod ink. _Well, what about me?_ _You going to answer that one?_

But to that second question  Louise has no answer at all. Hannah is as close to a native speaker of Heptapod as a human of her generation could be, but neither she nor any of the original speakers, as far as Louise has been able to determine in the 20 years since the Arrival, has ever experienced non-linear immersion to the degree that she herself did in that short span of months. She describes the experience to others — Hannah included — as like trying to remember a dream. _You can’t want it, you can’t try too hard, it slips away._ Privately, and because it is as reasonable a theory as any, she thinks of the alien language as something physical, something present and palpable, capable of resisting the power-hungry. Hannah drains her shake and Louise says, because she will be honest with her child at the end of their life, _I’ve never seen my own death. I think it's something we can’t know._

Hannah says,  _Sounds like bullshit_. 

* * *

  
_Well, I read it_ , says Ian, left sleeve bunched in his hand, his old nervous habit. _And it was incredible, not surprising._

_I thought about you when I was working on it,_  says Louise. _Something specific, I mean. Y_ _ou remember, you said about process._ _You said, "you can’t just jump around."_

Ian nods.

_It was never jumping around, Ian. It was jumping in._

He puts his hand over his face. He has never been able to cry in front of her, to expose himself entirely in that moment of vulnerability. His shoulders shake; she lets him have that scrap of privacy. 

* * *

A scene is being written over, like a wiped disc. Louise is standing beside Hannah’s bed, alone, and Hannah is cold in the wake of her departure to an unknowable place and —

The room is empty, the still air disturbed only by the measured passage of her own breathing, and — 

Louise is standing beside Hannah’s bed, and Ian is on the other side, and Hannah is still cold, and —

The room is less empty, because Ian is there, standing on the other side of the bed, crying silently, his shoulders shaking and his face covered with one hand, the other bunched in his sleeve.

Louise reaches out across the bed, across time, and waits for his hand. 

**Author's Note:**

> In fact, the film's ending shouldn't be fiddled with, I think — but I did. An experiment...


End file.
